Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World

More than almost anything else, globalization and the great world religions are shaping our lives, affecting everything from the public policies of political leaders and the economic decisions of industry bosses and employees to university curricula, all the way to the inner longings of our hearts. Integral to both globalization and religions are compelling, overlapping, and sometimes competing visions of what it means to live well.

American Colonies: The Settling of North America: Penguin History of the United States, Book 1

In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States series, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from millennia past through the decades of Western colonization and conquest and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.

The End of White Christian America

Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), challenges us to grasp the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality - that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation.

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

It Can't Happen Here

Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is dismayed to find that many of the people he knows support presidential candidate Berzelius Windrip. The suspiciously fascist Windrip is offering to save the nation from sex, crime, welfare cheats, and a liberal press. But after Windrip wins the election, dissent soon becomes dangerous for Jessup. Windrip forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state.

A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of the monstrous evil that was Nazism. After discovering the fire of true faith in a Harlem church, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and became one of the first to speak out against Hitler. As a double agent, he joined the plot to assassinate the Führer and was hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp at age thirty-nine. Since his death, Bonhoeffer has grown to be one of the most fascinating, complex figures of the twentieth century.

Church History in Plain Language: Fourth Edition

With more than 315,000 print copies sold, this is the story of the church for today’s listeners. Dr. Bruce Shelley makes church history come alive in this classic audiobook that has become not only the first choice of many laypeople and church leaders but the standard text in many college classrooms.

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.

Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

In the post-Christian context, public life has become markedly more secular and private life infinitely more diverse. Yet many Christians still rely on cookie-cutter approaches to evangelism and apologetics. Most of these methods assume that people are open to, interested in, and needy for spiritual insight when increasingly most people are not. The urgent need, then, is the capacity to persuade - to make a convincing case for the Gospel to people who are not interested in it.

In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

The evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement. In this exciting and sweeping history - the third in his trilogy of books on the ancient world - Tom Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds to create an imperial civilization.

A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

Edward I is familiar to millions as "Longshanks", conqueror of Scotland and nemesis of Sir William Wallace (in Braveheart). Yet this story forms only the final chapter of the king's action-packed life. Earlier, Edward had defeated and killed the famous Simon de Montfort, traveled to the Holy Land, and conquered Wales. He raised the greatest armies of the Middle Ages and summoned the largest parliaments. Notoriously, he expelled all the Jews from his kingdom.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures, and religions, and it was the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the emergence of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death, the struggles of the Great Game, and the fall of Communism - the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a 55-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Madison's Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America

Short, plain, balding, neither soldier nor orator, low on charisma and high on intelligence, Madison cared more about achieving results than taking the credit. To reach his lifelong goal of a self-governing constitutional republic, he blended his talents with those of key partners. It was Madison who led the drive for the Constitutional Convention and pressed for an effective new government as his patron George Washington lent the effort legitimacy.

Paradise Lost

John Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny.

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

Boston in 1775 is an island city occupied by British troops after a series of incendiary incidents by patriots who range from sober citizens to thuggish vigilantes. After the Boston Tea Party, British and American soldiers and Massachusetts residents have warily maneuvered around each other until April 19, when violence finally erupts at Lexington and Concord.

Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution

In September 1776 the vulnerable Continental Army, under an unsure George Washington (who had never commanded a large force in battle), evacuates New York after a devastating defeat by the British army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeds in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have ended the war.

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

From one of the world's leading writers on religion and the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling A History of God, The Battle for God, and The Spiral Staircase, comes a major new work: a chronicle of one of the most important intellectual revolutions in world history and its relevance to our own time.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

From the best-selling author of Assassination Vacation and Unfamiliar Fishes, a humorous account of the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette - the one Frenchman we could all agree on - and an insightful portrait of a nation's idealism and its reality. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States is a humorous and insightful portrait of the famed Frenchman, the impact he had on our young country, and his ongoing relationship with instrumental Americans of the time.

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions

Militant atheism is on the rise. In recent years, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have produced a steady stream of best-selling books denigrating religious belief. These authors are merely the leading edge of a larger movement that includes much of the scientific community. In response, mathematician David Berlinski, himself a secular Jew, delivers a biting defense of religious thought.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles.

The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

In The Day the Revolution Began, N. T. Wright once again challenges commonly held Christian beliefs, as he did in Surprised by Hope. Demonstrating the rigorous intellect and breathtaking knowledge that have long defined his work, Wright argues that Jesus' death on the cross was not only to absolve us of our sins, it was actually the beginning of a revolution commissioning the Christian faithful to a new vocation - a royal priesthood responsible for restoring and reconciling all of God's creation.

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.

Publisher's Summary

This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. Williams's interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop's vision of his "City upon a Hill.

I remember Roger Williams from my high school and college days as the founder of Rhode Island, but I didn't know much more about him than that. I have four children, all of them adults. I asked each one of them, on separate occasions, if they had studied about Roger Williams in school. Not one of my children had even heard of Roger Williams. That is sad. It is doubly sad because it is such a fascinating story, told extremely well here by one of my favorite authors. He actually was going to write about the home front during World War I, but became intrigued about Roger Williams and the influence on him from Edward Koch, who he worked closely with, and Francis Bacon.

I did not know how strongly he stood for freedom, many times at personal peril. Through this audiobook, I learned to appreciate his independent thought, his courage, his determination, and his advocacy of the cause of freedom, even for those who did not believe as he believed. In fact, especially for those, including the Indians, with whom he had a strong relationship throughout his life. He was much respected by them, even during times of war.

I had thought before that he just gone down to Rhode Island when he was banished from Massachusetts and founded it. End of story. This book completely dispels that notion, detailing the constant struggle to maintain a bastion of freedom and not be swallowed up by the aggressiveness and religious intolerance of the Massachusetts Bay Colonies. This book fills a very definite hole in my understanding of pre-colonial America, despite my having read a number of books on this era. It also gives a very good account of what was happening in England before and during the early colonization of Massachusetts and the surrounding area, during the reigns of James I and Charles I. Highly recommended.

I originally downloaded this book for some history on Rhode Island (where I live), and was surprised by the amount of political and cultural context it provides, on both sides of the atlantic.

A good deal of the first half is a sweeping tour of the culture and politics in england that pushed people to look to america to escape an increasingly volatile domestic front. It then details the events in the Massachusetts bay colony leading up to williams' exile and the formation of Rhode Island. In turn, it builds him up as the embodiment of the emigration movement, and ultimately of the independent and free spirit that sparked a revolution and led to the foundation of a new nation.

It does a fantastic job of both painting a cultural picture of that time, as well as transposing its visible impact on the classic american frame of mind throughout the years. For a relatively concise book, it really covers a lot of ground in a very entertaining fashion.

The end kind of trailed off unceremoniously, but it wasn't anything that would diminish my strong recommendation to check this one out.

Also -- the narrator is quite good! He's definitely taken an acting class or two -- very dramatic and lively at times.

This was a book club choice that I would not have chosen on my own without prompting but John Barry delivered a thought provoking portrait of a man and his times that kept me engaged from the start. Barry reveals Williams as a complex, courageous and principled man and original thinker whose ideas of religious freedom were far ahead of his time. I would definitely listen to John Barry's works again. He has a gift for making somewhat arcane topics highly readable and enlightening. One of my all time favorite non-fiction works is his Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. That book marries the hydrology of the Mississippi River with a social history of a region in the grip of one of the most massive natural disasters ever to befall this country before a functional social safety net was in place.

What did you love best about Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul?

This book was more than a biography of a compelling historic figure. It provided a lively and comprehensive overview of the English religious wars of the early 17th Century and the religious conflicts of early Colonial times in New England, with occasional comparisons to today's similar conflicts.

But the best part was the characterizations. We learned so much about figures like King James and King Charles, Sir Edward Coke and the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Cotton and even leading Narragansett and Mohegan sachems. The book provides a real sense of the day-to-day conflicts that were faced by residents of New England.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Roger Williams was a far more remarkable figure than I had realized. I had always thought of him as a kind of cardboard figure who founded Rhode Island for religious dissidents. But this book brings to life his bravery and his humility, as well as his growing focus on liberty of conscience and toleration of other religions. You can follow the development of his philosophy as the book traces his...well, "adventures" is a good word.

Have you listened to any of Richard Poe’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Richard Poe is one of my favorite narrators. I have been listening to him on Recorded Books since something called "The Last Farmer," about an aging but independent midwestern farmer. He does a great job with nonfiction--clear, engaged and likeable.

Richard Poe, narrator of this book, pauses for from 1 to 3 seconds between every sentence. I listen while I ride my bike to work, while I walk the dog, while I drive and I find it impossible to retain any continuity with the subject. Constantly rewinding to figure out who or what is being covered. The book itself sounds fascinating. But after chipping away at an hour of it, I admitted defeat.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul?

What struck me more than anything else in this book was the character of Roger Williams himself. I was fascinated that he is not a much more prominent figure in American history. When I've read about our Founding Fathers, I have often been struck by how far their own ideas and actions were from the fundamental American values we take such pride in today (for example, Jefferson and slavery). The opposite struck me about Williams. He was the first to view Native Americans as equally human, even learned their language, and tried to argue they actually had a legal right to their land - certainly a radical concept in America for hundreds of years after. He argued for full and true religious freedom (on a personal level, not just colony by colony), was the first to argue for what we would recognize as the separation of church and state, and was probably North America's first abolitionist.

What about Richard Poe’s performance did you like?

Absolutely! He was clear and enjoyable to listen to, and I liked that he added a little drama to the voices and quotes without over doing it.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I was tempted to listen to it all at once - especially the second half - and I definitely listened to it for much longer sets of time than I had originally planned. I'll probably listen to chunks of it again, because I want to go back over some of the details.

Ok, I admit I was predisposed to love this book. I moved from Florida to Rhode Island for college, fell in love with the place and like so many others before me never left. That being said this book did nothing to disappoint me and filled in so many missing aspects of my understanding of the absolute earliest days in colonial America.

One aspect that made this book difficult at times for me at least is that I am not religious and in order to fully lay out how radical it was for a profoundly religious Puritan to essentially be the first person to fully flesh out Church-State separation, the early chapters had to focus significantly on religious details of both the Church of England and the Puritan religion. This part was a bit slow and boring for me but proved necessary to understand later passages.

Following this, the story really picks up in early Puritan Massachusetts where a beautiful and simple story of the founding of Boston are laid out, as well as Roger William's role and eventual ostracism (can there be a spoiler alert in historical non-fiction?). After this and for the most point from Boston on, this reads like an adventure novel. Roger Williams becomes a truly fascinating, noble and heroic character

The narration is superb and Richard Poe's rich baritone supplied both color and gravitas and even emotion into this great story even through slower parts.

I am both a better American and a better Rhode Islander for having read this!

I've always been fascinated by Roger Williams but have found that there is little to read about him. Most history teachers cover him in a single paragraph. After listening to this book I now understand why. The author does and excellent job presenting the brilliance and humility of this man who formed the basis for true freedom of religion and helped lay the foundation of this country's beginning. I recently listened to another lecture on the religious history of the US and that person as well pointed to Roger Williams as the basis for this nation's unique religious liberty laws. Mr Williams knew that it was not the job of civil government to define what the true religion was to be, he knew that is WAS the job of civil government to create the climate where various religions could thrive. The Puritan were all for religious freedom for themselves but if you came afoul of their particular beliefs then the penalty could, and usually was, severe. Roger Williams was unique in that he recognized that there were obvious errors in the teachings of the various religious groups he saw around him but he also knew that he wasn't called by God to form a new religion. His latter life he was content to withdraw from mainstream religion and instead studied peacefully at his home. He treated the Indians fairly and the way he would like to be treated. This is well worth the time to listen to.

What did you like best about Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul? What did you like least?

I bought this expecting a biography of Roger Williams. But his life is only one of many explored in this book. The title should actually be, "The Puritan Movement in England and America, 1560-1640," since that better captures the true subject of this book. There are huge sections, especially the first 10 chapters, that have little or nothing to do with Williams, though all of it is relevant to the Puritan movement that produced him. So it's a good book if you're interested in the subject of Puritanism and its impact on the colonization of America, but I don't like misleading titles.

Would you be willing to try another one of Richard Poe’s performances?

The reader's voice is more suited to NFL Films or something like that rather than books. His turgid narration made it that much harder to get through this book.

A seemly exhaustive effort poured into every detail. It stands to reason why the book is 36 chapters. I learned a great deal of what of not only the early struggles of Puritan's but of American history that should be taught in American school's.